Alastair Coote

the USA built a system of higher education so good that smart/rich people from across the world came here, spending billions to learn here, subsidizing education for Americans while spending money to live in our cities and towns. our government arbitrarily decided we should stop doing that

>> For two weeks, three reporters knocked on more than 200 doors in four boroughs and interviewed more than 100 people. In some buildings, the majority of the people we spoke with said their signatures had been forged.

Man dressed up as a Tesla Robot holding a cigarette while looking at camera

I went to the Tesla Diner and all I got was a robot smokin a cig

There’s a lot of hysteria about NYC that sounds silly after you’ve lived here so long. This, though, shocked me the first time I saw it and still shocks me today.

Musk signed a binding contract to purchase twitter for a price that wildly exceeded its plausible value. He could not lawfully back out of it without a counterparty consent that twitter’s fiduciaries could not lawfully give. It’s just how Delaware law works, whether or not I think it’s funny.

So we’re just pretending all those metaverse predictions didn’t happen huh

It's a bizarre and frankly alienating feeling realizing that if you know the basic fact that the murder rate has gone down significantly since 1990 you're in the ~90th+ percentile of fact-knowers

An abandoned minibus has been parked in metered parking near my apartment building for over a month now. Reported it in 311 over a week ago, it was closed because they already know. And still here it stands.

No, it’s not the end of the world. But sure would be nice if we fixed the little things.

Please don't plug keyboards or other devices into random USB ports, ok?

There go those political instincts again

Boring post of the night: NYC.gov hosts a map of all the bike racks in the city. From time to time I’ve found myself browsing around on Google Street View to see if a destination has parking… but this is much better nycdot.maps.arcgis.com/apps/webappv...

New: @nytimes.com has confirmed that Trump was listed as a contributor to Jeffrey Epstein's 50th birthday book. We are publishing a page from the book: a letter handwritten by Ghislaine Maxwell. www.nytimes.com/2025/07/24/u...

The clerks where I get my lunch said a man came in last week and asked them where the public entrance to 26 Federal Plaza was. He locked his bike outside, and it’s been there since.

Oh that's interesting, is that the new model on Twitter? Post the image then post the actual link in a reply so the original post still gets the juice? Good grief

I think it's because they made the mistake of attaching a link. Instant downranking. (all the more reason Twitter is useless for media orgs)

The problem with political media, conveniently distilled into 3 paragraphs.

Government as a social game, where the mere exercising of power is met with adulation while the actual substance is of no material interest. They don’t actually care what politicians do, just whether a politician can do it.

Going to stick my neck out and say the Japanese market for excessively oversized pickup trucks is not huge

President Trump, in terms of raw accomplishments, crushed his first six months in historic ways. Massive tax cuts. Record-low border crossings. Surging tariff revenue. Stunning air strikes in Iran. Modest inflation. Yet poll after poll suggests most Americans aren't impressed. In fact, they seem tired of all the winning, Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen write in a "Behind the Curtain" column. Why it matters: Trump appears to be losing by winning. The more he does [link.axios.com] (including issues beyond his legislative wins), the more the general public, especially independents, shrug — or recoil.

Quite the intro to today's Axios

what this makes me think about - with regard to right now - is how so much of the information about Trump and Epstein that’s resonated in recent weeks is old stuff, widely and publicly reported. but a lot of it didn’t break through to lots of ppl in their information environments

Exclusive: Newly discovered photos and video shed fresh light on Trump’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein | CNN Politics Newly uncovered archived video footage and photos reveal fresh details about Donald Trump’s past relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.

🚨NEW: We uncovered multiple photos of Jeffrey Epstein at Donald Trump‘s wedding. Photos of the pair together earlier that year at an event. And video of Epstein Stein and Trump at the 1999 Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show. www.cnn.com/2025/07/22/p...

“Altman is backing a tool called The Orb, built by Tools for Humanity, that says it will offer “proof of human” in a world where AI makes it harder to distinguish what, and who, is real online.”

phew so the guy who helped create the problem happens to also have the solution what are the chances

Bari’s key insight as an entrepreneur is that there is a bottomless demand for rich people to have their existing opinions sold back to them as forbidden knowledge

really interesting that we don’t have a cultural panic about group think and intellectual homogeneity among the most powerful money men in the country. all the more interesting when a bunch of them have clearly lost their mind.

Can The Washington Post’s TikTok Guy Make It Without The Post?

scoop: @davejorgenson, one of the breakout stars of the Marty Baron era of The Post, is leaving to start his own company with two Post alums

www.nytimes.com/2025/07/22/b...

Everyone assumes that AI is going to replace technical jobs but what if its biggest initial impact is replacing influencers? A lot of their content is an abstraction on top of real life anyway

(not to mention following my kids interests we’ve now had a string of Chris Pratt in the LEGO Movie -> Chris Pratt in Mario / Jack Black in Mario -> Jack Black in Minecraft. They’re not excited for that, if anything it’s confusing!)

My only disappointment was discovering Matt Berry was originally supposed to play Steve. Would have been inspired.

Chart showing risk of being murdered in the subway if you rode 500 times last year (0.4 in 100,000) versus other risks such as that of dying in a traffic accident in the US last year (12.1 in 100,000)

The subway risk chart you've been waiting for (Sawyer County, Wisconsin, is where Sean Duffy is from). Gift link: www.bloomberg.com/opinion/arti...

In a stunning moment of carnal desire, my calculator said “BOOBIE5”